No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.

From my standpoint, being an artist, I want to see what the new construction is between artist and audience.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

If everything isn’t black and white, I say, ‚Why the hell not?‘

The bottom line is that everyone thinks differently.

I like being able to be on the inside of music, rather than on the outside listening to it.

Here ends my forever memorable first High Sierra excursion. I have crossed the Range of Light, surely the brightest and best of all the Lord has built. And, rejoicing in its glory, I gladly, gratefully, hopefully pray I may see it again.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

Have you ever thought how humiliating and distressing it was to be placed upon a sphere? For friendship it is a boon never to be able to be further apart than the antipodes. But suppose that you are leaving together to go on and on; it is impossible. To go beyond a certain point is to return to where you began.

Being happy is a matter of personal taste.

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

The greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a man’s own eyes when they look upon his own person.

To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.

Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?

It takes no more time to see the good side of life than it takes to see the bad.

There was a while when I was feeling like, ‚Damn, if I’d just been born black, I would not have to go through all this‘.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

The moment a person forms a theory, his imagination sees in every object only the traits which favor that theory.

I love to put on lotion. Sometimes I’ll watch TV and go into a lotion trance for an hour. I try to find brands that don’t taste bad in case anyone wants to taste me.

I always kind of see how I want things to be better, and I’m generally not happy with how things are or the level of service that we’re providing for people or the quality of the teams that we built. But if you look at this objectively, we’re doing so well on so many of these things. I think it’s important to have gratitude for that.

The long time to come when I shall not exist has more effect on me than this short present time, which nevertheless seems endless.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

I like some animals more than some people, some people more than some animals.

One and the same thing can at the same time be good, bad, and indifferent, e.g., music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I’ve never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a ‚fat cat‘ and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a ‚public-spirited philanthropist‘.

I would impress upon your minds the fact that if you want to do a man justice, you should believe what a man says himself rather than what people say he says.

In Italy they take cheap cloth and make it look expensive, but I take expensive cloth and make it look cheap. They just don’t understand.

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experience, but that’s not where I live.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.

We should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing: he is at the most time’s carcass.

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.

There is so much that people take for granted.

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

I’m astounded by people who want to ‚know‘ the universe when it’s hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

I’ve always felt like there was a lot of hype around me even when there wasn’t. I felt like everyone was talking about me even when no one was talking about me.

The good is the beautiful.

I’m rather kind of old school, thinking that when an artist does his work, it’s no longer his… I just see what people make of it.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they see; it is above, not against them.

People always say when they meet me that I’m not what they expect. I assume they think I’m this super dark and depressing guy, but I like to channel all of those emotions into my work.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

I’ve never understood why people consider youth a time of freedom and joy. It’s probably because they have forgotten their own.

Beauty and femininity are ageless and can’t be contrived, and glamour, although the manufacturers won’t like this, cannot be manufactured. Not real glamour; it’s based on femininity.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

Movies are fun, but they are no cure for cancer.

It’s true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

Many people find the universe confusing – it’s not.

A man lives by believing something: not by debating and arguing about many things.